Unbelievable! My piece, lumpensammler was selected to be among the top 100 mobile paintings, i.e., digital iPad artwork, at the Mobile Digital Arts & Creativity Summit, 2016…click here to see the top 100.

Thanks to Google Maps and my iPad’s screenshot capability, I was able to travel across the continent – and back in time a little – to the very first fire hydrant in my life on the corner of Murdock St. and Hutchinson Ave. in Canonsburg, PA.

(click to enlarge)

Here you see a modern representation of my native fire plug so that you can better picture me, not long after Alaska and Hawaii achieved statehood, small enough to sit with my butt on the main outlet cap, my legs straddling the secondary outlet caps, while holding onto the head of the hydrant. I would be facing the building on the corner, which at that time was Marcantonio’s market. A large mail box used to be right in front of the fire hydrant against the building. The bigger kids used to sit on top of it. We were all assuming our positions in a tradition that seemed to have neither a beginning nor an ending.

…one thing I’d like to show him is Google Maps; I’d play the rest by ear.

Click to enlarge to full size: 2048 x 2048

I started this piece a few weeks ago in SketchBook and finished it this evening in Procreate on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using this wonderful photo reference (from the late 1980s) in a side by side, freehand digital paintings:

(late 1980s)

Joseph T. Longo
1920 – 1990

A bonus glimpse of the man and his cigar, my mom (1917 – 1977), and me from the late 1960s:

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